Francis B. Carpenter, Six Months at the White House

[276] executive of a republican government can necessarily never be free. Harassed with applications of every description, he once said that it sometimes seemed as if every visitor “darted at him, and with thumb and finger carried off a portion of his vitality.”

As the day of his reinauguration approached, he said to Senator Clark, of New Hampshire, “Can't you and others start a public sentiment in favor of making no changes in offices except for good and sufficient cause? It seems as though the bare thought of going through again what I did the first year here, would crush me.” To another he said, “I have made up my mind to make very few changes in the offices in my gift for my second term. I think now that I will not remove a single man, except for delinquency. To remove a man is very easy, but when I go to fill his place, there are twenty applicants, and of these I must make nineteen enemies.” “Under these circumstances,” says one of his friends, “Mr. Lincoln's natural charity for all was often turned into an unwonted suspicion of the motives of men whose selfishness cost him so much wear of mind. Once he said, ‘Sitting here, where all the avenues to public patronage seem to come together in a knot, it does seem to me that our people are fast approaching the point where it can be said that seven eighths of them are trying to find how to live at the expense of the other eighth.’ ”